Saturday, July 31, 2010

WWW:Watch - A Novel

I just finished reading the Robert J. Sawyer novel, "WWW:WATCH" that was a sequel to WAKE and I do anticipate reading and enjoying the next one in the series WONDER coming out in 2011.

I read the first novel "WWW:WAKE" in serial form in a science fiction magazine and did enjoy it. The idea is that a conscious entity emerges spontaneously from the Internet.

Because I do understand a lot of the science that is behind the fiction in the book and those parts are pretty much correct from what I could see, then it was a short step to 'suspend-my-sense-of-disbelief' an enjoy the story.

Having said that I can now talk a little real-world stuff:
  • Assuming that such a thing did come to exist there is a place in the book where the group that was trying to shutdown WebMind could have done a better job. If they were 'on-their-toes' they could have, in cooperation with the companies that supply updates to the routers send out a 'code-update' to all the routers that would cause them to instantly ignore 'mutant-packets' that are supposed to make up the entity.

  • It is the case that routers all over the world are responsible for sending packets along.

  • However the possible existence of 'mutant-packets' that have a 'time-to-die' count that prevents them from expiring is almost certainty impossible. The packets themselves are are [1] received, [2] inspected, [3] sent along or not sent along. The third of these three activities depends on the packet passing some basic integrity tests. Sadly, 'mutant-packets' would instantly fail the test and be ignored. However having said that I can imagine that a 'self-modifying-packet' could be added to the type of Internet packets processed and such a packet could somehow fit the bill. I expect implementation of such a packet would be a significant change to how Internet routers work.

  • About a sufficiently complex cellular automaton spontaneously becoming conscious: I do think that sufficiently complex system can undergo and do indeed undergo 'self-organization' events. Even very simple systems can be thought of as undergoing self organization events. However I think that for 'self-organization' events to rise to the level of a conscious object requires something more than just becoming self organized.

  • An example of the result of a highly self organized event is a biological cell and multi cellular life forms. So this could and did emerge spontaneously (with apologizes to the Intelligent Design folks). To get form a spontaneously organized complex object to to a conscious object requires another step. I believe that consciousness actually is the ability of an organism (or object, or cellular automaton) to take its sensory inputs and then use them as inputs into a modeling engine that then drives its outputs (movements) in such a fashion that it can negotiate its environment.

  • In the story the cellular automaton only gradually acquired sensory inputs. In the story the consciousness existed before it had sensory inputs. I think this is not correct. I think this is an example of the chicken-or-the-egg where the story had the wrong thing first. First there are sensory inputs into the complex system and then there emerges the ability of the system to model those inputs with the result being the ability of the system to negotiate its environment. As this model gets better and better then the amount of 'consciousness-stuff' increases.

  • In the story there is nothing that explains what consciousness actually is. I think any talk of consciousness requires such a thing because I think that you can not contemplate this without thinking about what it actually is.

  • The story can certainly get away with this part. So in the end the emerging consciousness is described as this completely unexpected thing. No discussion of how it came about just that it did. And when you think about self organizing systems in general it is not clear how they self organize. I do expect that once we get a handle on how this occurs from first principals we will have at that time a much deeper understanding of things than we do now.

Saturday, July 17, 2010

A Week At The Beach - Day 0 and Day 1

I took off early from work yesterday and went home and loaded up the car. Bikes on top and all my gear in the back seat. Evelyn left for the beach earlier in the week. Robert and I drove down starting about 12PM. We stopped for lunch at the Chili's Restaurant in Goldsboro and arrived about 4:30. Once the bikes were in the little house out back and all my stuff in the house it was almost supper time. Ted came over and ate with us and Robert returned to Raleigh after supper. We had a grad visit with Ted and Robert did send us a text message as he arrived back in Raleigh.

This morning I decided to walk down to the 7th Street Gazebo and Pier (Conch Point) and do my Tai-Chi exercises. Here is a slide show of the pictures I took. The morning is quite breezy and humid but beautiful.




Also here is a short video clip of an egret




Here is short video clip of the roll cloud that preceded the thunderstorm. It was taken from the walkway out from the cottage at Emerald Island.



Thursday, July 08, 2010

Wednesday, July 07, 2010

07 JULY 2010 Summer Reading

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/taocp.html

Just left is a picture of the books. And above the picture is the web page for the books.

I am really looking forward to reading these books. I'll post back to this entry when I find something interesting that I want to share.


Here is the author's Wikipedia.ORG page:

And here is the Wikipedia.ORG page for the books:

Tuesday, July 06, 2010

Sunday, July 04, 2010

Free Will - More On Consciousness As A Modeling Engine

Here is the post from Scot Adams Blog: http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/selfprogramming

Excellent, and it fits in with the idea that I like, that consciousness is what emerges from a motile organism's need and ability to predict the future so it can negotiate its environment successfully.

The more complex and 'self-referential' such a modeling capability is the more we say that the organism is intelligent. Given this scale then an organism that models it's sensory inputs with the result of what Scott Adams calls reprogramming and mood changing is said to have a higher intelligence.

The whole idea of what "Free Will" is then becomes, just, an artifact of this way of conceptualizing consciousness.

All organisms that have the capability of modeling their sensory inputs in order to negotiate their future environment have free will. Free will is defined as the process of negotiating their environment based on what the sensory inputs are and the model's output is.

Given a sufficiently complex self referential system that is doing the modeling and subsequent environmental negotiation all the attributes of free will are covered.

Saturday, July 03, 2010

03 JULY 2010 - Nice Bike Ride

Evelyn got out to the place where we join the American Tobacco Trail Rails To Trails bike, walking, running, and equestrian path at 7:54AM this morning. The temperature was in the low 60's and it was beautiful.

We headed north toward Chatham County and the nice paved part and rode the entire paved part and turned around and rode back to the parking lot where we got on. By the time we got home it was only 10:00AM and most of our Saturday is still to come.

What a nice way to start the holiday weekend.

Here are the stats:

01:09 ... HH:MM Time
19.35 ... KM Distance Traveled
16.60 ... KPH Average Rate